


Losing Dogs

by zacian



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Animal Metaphors, Character Study, Coming of Age, F/M, Falling In Love, Introspection, References to Depression, and the aftermath, like a lot of animal metaphors lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-18 08:26:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29365464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zacian/pseuds/zacian
Summary: Gloria is the unraveling of him, and the salvation.Hop has a lot of feelings about his rival. He’s not quite sure what to make of any of them.
Relationships: Hop/Yuuri | Gloria
Comments: 7
Kudos: 18





	Losing Dogs

**Author's Note:**

> yep im back with more ramblings because i love these characters and i cannot be stopped

* * *

Gloria is rabid ruination. She sets out to do one thing and that is to put the competition in the ground. Hop thinks she should almost scare anyone who doesn’t know her, this girl so doggedly determined—

“Sure doesn’t she look like one?” laughs the cleverest of the row sat on the bench, a sharp-faced girl with copper curls. “Spittin’ teeth and foamin’ at the mouth like a Boltund got loose on the pitch!”

She nudges the ones beside her and a short trill of laughter rings up, a chorus of voices save for Hop’s. The only thing that rises in his throat is the bile.

He will have a word with her, then, something nasty dressed in niceties because he is polite and was mothered into a gentleman but being kind doesn’t mean taking things sitting down, and especially not when they’re volleyed at the ones you care about.

She will sneer and call her his little pet and ask him what he cares if he’s trying to secure the win against her ( _she should be your rival, here, nothing more nothing less_ ). He will bite his tongue—to staunch the uglier things bubbling beneath it but also because he isn’t sure what he can say to that that won’t give him hopelessly, gracelessly away.

No matter; he is not needed anyhow. He learns quickly enough that she can fight her own battles. The girl’s Centiskorch smolders away to Gloria’s Runerigus and that sets the stage for her elimination.

(Cleverness means nothing to brute power and raw, snarling strength. He will learn that soon enough, too.)

* * *

Home feels like a foregone conclusion. The book opens here, and it closes here.

His grandmother eases the door in, wrings her hands against his like she hasn’t seen him in years — “ _Arrey_ , you’re all bones and skin. Come in out of the rain before you catch cold.” — and ushers him inside with a matronly brusqueness.

Even the food he gets is leftovers, day-old rounds of rewarmed chapati that split like hardtack in his mouth. The mint leaf tea stings sour like nettles when he drinks it down.

Leon’s legacy sputters and dies with little fanfare. Hop says, “Sorry,” but no one blames him for it.

There is a small mourning, a come-and-go of family around the table where he sits, the light farce of a funeral procession, but no one says any eulogies; no one offers condolences. 

They are not disappointed because they maybe never expected anything else. He finishes the tea so as not to waste anything and sleeps dreamlessly in his unkept bed.

* * *

Gloria congratulates him, trophy held under a well-muscled arm like a tattering sack of grain, comically large against her small body. He doesn’t understand why till she explains it to him like she’s spelling things out to a child.

The grin that splits her face is harshly earnest; the sweat beaded along her brow and drying in her matted brown hair is an adaptation of the exhaustion the fields once drew from them. It comes from a very different line of work now. 

(There is no space for her in those fields anymore. She has outgrown them, got so big even the showy, blinkering stadium can barely hold all her might.)

“For giving your best,” she says, and Hop almost startles, an underdog feeling warm palms for the first time. “I don’t think I could’ve got this far without you, and yours was always a fair fight. That’s more than I can say about most of this sorry lot.”

And she laughs, then, a hoarse and unruly thing, louder even than his own. The scrape of her lungs like a knife against whetstone shouldn’t make his heart hammer in his chest with anything other than fearful awe.

He knows with devastating clarity, now, that he never stood a chance.

* * *

Gloria is a satellite orbiting too near until she finds her own gravity and crashes mindlessly into him. She leaves a blistering crater in the soft depression of his sternum where he thought he had room only for the adrenaline.

* * *

Postwick winters in forget-me-nots and bluing windowsills. The frost sticks to the panes and to the crops.

Some time ago, he might have seen her in the death of the waning wheat. The snow comes hard and fast and bitter this year like the glaciers she is sloughed from, the highland omens that trickle down through her like the excess of an avalanche.

But Gloria is a drought now, a sticky heat that radiates from the sorest spot in his chest. There’s no part of him that doesn’t burn, these days.

This is the only way he sees her in the off-season: in the artificial glow of the TV screen, a vision of rage and self-satisfaction at every vicious win. He thinks she should almost scare anyone who knows her like he does, this girl so stoutly unapologetic, so _big_ in her affection, that they cannot look away.

He can't bear to look at her for too long. It’s like staring at the sun.

* * *

“Think I might love her,” he says to his Dubwool, absently. The words crystallize in the air and hang there with the breath he loses.

Dubwool stares with black, saucer-wide eyes. It might be more obvious to him than to anyone. He’s heard more than his share of praise and laments and curses from his Trainer.

The Pokémon licks at his hand like he’s lapping at salt and Hop laughs, fully, the first time he has felt real warmth since Gloria left his trajectory.

* * *

  
Spring is late this year. The snowmelt lingers; then comes the rain.

The fields go slick with mud. He itches for the outdoors again, trapped inside with the glow of the greenhouse and the shuffle of pages.

His phone buzzes and flashes with her name, sometimes. He can almost hear her bewildered questions, flung at him rapid fire. He wants, more than anything, to see her face.

But their paths run parallel and the weight on his chest makes it hard to breathe. Makes it hard to lift his arms from the desk on his worse days; makes it hard to wake from his bed on his worst.

He says, “Some other time,” and tries to make himself and her believe it.

* * *

Gloria is a tracker and she will hunt him down if it’s the last thing she ever does.

* * *

She is every bit as terrible and magnificent as he remembers.

“Look at me and tell me what you want or don’t want.” She corners him in the grass, in the thicket between two homes, like a lost little lamb. “So help me, Hop, you’re not a dirty coward and I _know_ you’re not. Face me.”

He’s not, so he does.

It would be the wise thing to do to put his hands up in submission, say _I pose no threat to you_ like calming a wild and dangerous creature, but he knows her for more than her fangs and her claws. He finds her gaze, swallows the hitch in his throat when it doesn’t waver.

“Gloria, I don’t want to fight you.”

(It’s too late; she’s already in the late stage of her fury. He can’t do anything for her.)

 _But can’t you?_ says the part of his brain that is not grieving, the part that scans every point on the battlefield for an opening.

He knows no protocol here; the environment is not sterile; he is losing her, and fast. He can’t bring her back from this as easily as if she were just mortally wounded.

He only knows how to read the map of her face; the dark crescents under her eyes; the ruddy patches blooming like poinsettias on the white banks of her cheeks. He knows that she is an angry crier, the way tears start to roll messy off the edge of her chin.

She laughs, a skittering sound like a dull knife dragging. “‘Fraid it’s a bit late for that, now.” 

She’s bluffing. She’s all bark—no bite. The only thing that’s real in her blustering is the fear.

He makes himself small in his pain, catatonic. She is seething, combative. She does the only thing she knows how to do: challenges him. Bares her teeth, pulls her lips back to carve out glimmering canines.

She will not let him go without one last-ditch effort.

He will not let her go without the same.

The space between them slivers, gone in the instant that his baser instincts seize him. One hand comes to rest just behind her shoulder; the other finds the midpoint knit at the back of her jumper. His face touches down at the side of her head, and her hair smells faintly like straw. She is still a farmer’s daughter. She is still Gloria. The city cannot take that from her.

She is not delicate and not fragile, but she is not a beast. She is a girl. A friend. She has maybe never been treated this humanely by anyone but him; not roughed up, not handled, not tamed.

His touch is loose and careful and familiar. She could break free if she wanted to, could hurt him like this. It would be easy, a quick roll of him onto the ground on his belly or sharp knee to the hip. She is practiced, brawny, calloused from it. She’s a fighter. It is practically all she knows how to do.

(The only thing she does is lay warm palms over his back. He can feel the heat of them through his shirt.)

He says: “I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t speak. She doesn't need to. He has always said more than enough.

He says: “Gloria, I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to lose you.” _I’m still here. I’m still your friend before I’m anything else_. “I’m sorry. I was afraid.” 

(Maybe he still is. Responsibility tastes foreign on his tongue.)

She sniffs, hiccups, tears wetting the fabric of his front. “Nothing to be afraid of,” she says. “I don’t bite.”

To anyone who doesn’t know her, it might sound like the smaller meaning of his words went right over her head.

But she understands. Knows him like she knows the plot of land she sprouted from.

She lets him ease her back and take her hands, still shaking the slightest bit, paler than pale. She lets him say what they both know; what she understands because she shoulders the feeling with her, too.

It does not fix what’s broken, but it means something new can grow. Something good can come of it.

It is enough.

* * *

  
  


He has never been more than a patchwork of other people’s successes and failures: the faded fallout of a greater brother who raised him alone and was taken from him against his will; the schoolyard ramblings of an almost-sister who searched his face for traces of a long-lost friend; the mettle and guts of a girl who is so much stronger than him, possesses a sturdier foundation though they are built roughly from the same earth and stone.

_Five years old and she only knows the vaguest impression of Leon until Hop shows her, chest swelling like his brother’s wins are his own by heredity. Her eyes don’t light up on seeing his face any more than on seeing Hop’s._

She says, without words: But that is him, and you are you.

_Ten years old and he may as well be an only child for all she cares,_

(for all anyone cares; the cord was numbed and cut from his own flesh and blood the moment Leon’s Gym Challenge ended with his dizzying victory)

_stumbling after him through the brambles like he is her sole source of light, a brighter pull than the sun in the sky._

He has never been less than a world unto himself. He has never been less than whole.

* * *

He carries a secondhand pride that she steals away from him, whittles into an arrogance of her own. How she manages to make something of herself from others without wearing their clothes, he does not know. He does not care. He only does not want her to leave him behind when she goes on to bigger, better things.

But she is a bur in the wool of his coat and she will do no such thing. She takes him to Wyndon, invites him to beautiful defeat and takes him trainspotting after, just like in the before-times.

She says: You’re stuck with me. I’m not going anywhere.

* * *

~~Gloria is an agrestal anomaly planing along manicured turf. Gloria is a mad dog championing for a place atop the rubble she leaves in her wake.~~

* * *

Gloria is a girl—raised by wolves and forever chasing the hunter’s moon but a girl all the same.

She helps him build back what he has lost. She does not apologize, or lash herself, or weep at the casualties.

She only undoes the pieces so he can create something better. He slots himself into this better place with ease.

Gloria is brightly, brilliantly human, despite her best efforts. She is not tethered to anyone or anything.

She is free.

And finally, finally: he is, too.

**Author's Note:**

> do you ever just think about hop and get sad


End file.
